He would be a valuable regular on this site. I recall dozens of insightful comments he made
As long as we’re giving opinions on that: While many of his comments were interesting in an idiosyncratic, contrarian sort of way, I can’t claim I’ve ever actually gained any insight from any of his comments.
I agree that the ban won’t help, though—what has happened is just a natural consequence of people upvoting “interesting” instead of “rationality-improving” (which, paradoxically seems to have created userbase shifts which cause things to ultimately be less interesting)
A decent fraction of his posts hard hitting and solid, usually saying something in a way that clearly and effectively got the point across. However, a much larger fraction of his posts were one-liner quips and thinly disguised political screeds. I ended up downvoting more than upvoting, but I did upvote.
To be honest, I think people enjoyed his style more than his substance.
The core lesswrong community (at least, back when I was more active) don’t downvote to disagree. They upvote when something is thought provoking (as contrarian politics tends to be), they upvote novelty (again, contrarian politics) and they are more tolerant of critical tones than other parts of the net.
So even though there wasn’t much true insight and most people disagree with most of his opinions, it was interesting enough to read. I know I really enjoyed the influx of reactionaries for the first few months because it was a new and exciting thing...but then it kind of got tiresome—especially when reactionary voices started dominating completely unrelated conversations and influencing votes completely out of proportion to the number of members who actually held those views. Somehow, the reactionary users we had were also among the most active users, and naturally, they liked talking about politics.
(Please note: While I did not explicitly say it, the above implies by connotation that Nier and his unethical practices are reflective of reactionaries in general. This is unintentional. What I AM saying is that the reason Neir was upvoted is the same reason that reactionaries were upvoted, and the things I disliked about Nier’s writings is the same thing that I dislike about many but certainly not all of the reactionary user’s writings—in short, compelling style and novelty but failure to use parsimony and substance, too much confidence in opinions reached via long chains of mostly inference—even when they wrote on non-political topics. What I’m NOT saying is that all reactionary users are behaving unethically in the manner of Neir.)
His stuff was occasionally interestingly contrarian. I think it’s useful to have a few people around with political/social opinions outside the usual LW space of lukewarm leftist to libertarian to technocrat, if only to help avoid groupthink.
On the other hand, while it’s nice to have someone to point out that the emperor is naked, it usually needs to be done in a way that’s relatively hard to dismiss as a hateful diatribe.
As long as we’re giving opinions on that: While many of his comments were interesting in an idiosyncratic, contrarian sort of way, I can’t claim I’ve ever actually gained any insight from any of his comments.
I agree that the ban won’t help, though—what has happened is just a natural consequence of people upvoting “interesting” instead of “rationality-improving” (which, paradoxically seems to have created userbase shifts which cause things to ultimately be less interesting)
I’ve wondered about what those who liked about Nier’s contributions liked about them. Was he doing decent work on the technical topics I don’t follow?
A decent fraction of his posts hard hitting and solid, usually saying something in a way that clearly and effectively got the point across. However, a much larger fraction of his posts were one-liner quips and thinly disguised political screeds. I ended up downvoting more than upvoting, but I did upvote.
To be honest, I think people enjoyed his style more than his substance.
The core lesswrong community (at least, back when I was more active) don’t downvote to disagree. They upvote when something is thought provoking (as contrarian politics tends to be), they upvote novelty (again, contrarian politics) and they are more tolerant of critical tones than other parts of the net.
So even though there wasn’t much true insight and most people disagree with most of his opinions, it was interesting enough to read. I know I really enjoyed the influx of reactionaries for the first few months because it was a new and exciting thing...but then it kind of got tiresome—especially when reactionary voices started dominating completely unrelated conversations and influencing votes completely out of proportion to the number of members who actually held those views. Somehow, the reactionary users we had were also among the most active users, and naturally, they liked talking about politics.
(Please note: While I did not explicitly say it, the above implies by connotation that Nier and his unethical practices are reflective of reactionaries in general. This is unintentional. What I AM saying is that the reason Neir was upvoted is the same reason that reactionaries were upvoted, and the things I disliked about Nier’s writings is the same thing that I dislike about many but certainly not all of the reactionary user’s writings—in short, compelling style and novelty but failure to use parsimony and substance, too much confidence in opinions reached via long chains of mostly inference—even when they wrote on non-political topics. What I’m NOT saying is that all reactionary users are behaving unethically in the manner of Neir.)
His stuff was occasionally interestingly contrarian. I think it’s useful to have a few people around with political/social opinions outside the usual LW space of lukewarm leftist to libertarian to technocrat, if only to help avoid groupthink.
On the other hand, while it’s nice to have someone to point out that the emperor is naked, it usually needs to be done in a way that’s relatively hard to dismiss as a hateful diatribe.